Critical Essay by Nicholas P. Spanos and Jack Gottlieb

In the following excerpt, Spanos and Gottlieb offer a rebuttal to Linda R. Caporael's thesis, examining the symptoms of the participants in the Salem witchcraft trials, but finding no evidence that convulsive ergotism played a role in the crisis.

In a recent article in Science (1) it was suggested that the residents of Salem Village, Massachusetts, who in 1692 charged some of their neighbors with witchcraft did so because of delusions resulting from convulsive ergotism. The author of the article, L. R. Caporael, argued that (i) the general features of the Salem crisis corresponded to the features of an epidemic of convulsive ergotism, (ii) symptoms manifested by the girls who were the principal accusers were those of ergot poisoning, (iii...